


K'tonet passim

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [11]
Category: The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Devotion, F/M, Female Jewish Character, Future Fic, Sewing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-16 11:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13635069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: Now Yisrael loved Yosef more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a coat of many colours.New York, 1946.





	K'tonet passim

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



✡ - ✡ - ✡

Nowadays it seems all Chava’s work is wedding dresses. Girls with husbands just back from the war wanting their mothers’ dresses altered to fit them and the times, girls whose husbands never came back wanting their dresses turned back to daywear, girls who had been waiting until there was better stuff than parachute silk on the market, girls who want to add a little parachute silk in as a token, girls transforming workaday clothes into something special, girls who’d heard that young Chava Levy in Manhattan was the best seamstress around for anything you needed done, even if she did still do almost all her sewing by hand. 

It’s true, for what it’s worth. Chava has fifty years of experience without the twisted fingers and strained eyes earned by women made out of flesh instead of clay who pass the decades with a needle in hand. 

Her needles, too, are something special. It isn’t every New York seamstress who could boast that her needles are never stamped or twisted, but rather molded by hand by an illustrious jinn of Syria. Not that Chava would, obviously. 

Even so, the fact is that Chava is still, in her purposefully quiet way, the best seamstress in Manhattan and possibly the best in all the city that matters.

Enough people know this that her own small room in the apartment above Arbeely’s shop—or rather, in the tall house that was once Arbeely’s one-story workshop- has wedding dresses laid carefully across every flat surface and hung straight on half the vertical ones. The moon shining through the window makes the white gowns glow, turns the poorer girls’ green or blue dresses into peacock mysteries, makes the two service uniforms fade into the paneling. 

Chava’s own wedding dress is in the most shadowed corner of the room, in the wardrobe in the northeast corner. In a deep trunk with a rack, wrapped carefully in tissue paper replaced every five years. It has yellowed, in the decades since it was worn, but not badly. The moths have never gotten their little mandibles into it; no careless fingers have ever torn the trim or popped off a button. Chava thinks of it only rarely, sees it only when it is time to change the tissue. The scraps she saves from each wedding dress that passes through her hands are not for repairing memories. 

Chava smooths out the scrap of heavy cream satin snipped from the dress of an uptown girl who doesn’t like long trains weighing her down even for an afternoon’s ceremony. It is a conveniently long and narrow shape, good quality fabric, a pleasantly warm yellow undertone. It will go nicely. 

She stands and walks to the wardrobe, careful to tread lightly so as not to wake Ahmad sleeping next door, Arbeely upstairs. Reaching past the trunk with its rack, Chava pulls out her quilt. 

In her fanciful moments, Chava thinks it looks rather like the desert lit by moonlight. It is all arcs and crescents and bars of white, eggshell, ivory, sand, the occasional cloud-shadow dash of black or blue or dove grey. The long strip of cream satin will tie a cluster of smaller swatches together nicely. 

Chava won’t ever need a wedding dress of her own. She will not marry again, she knows. Ahmad wouldn’t appreciate the gown on its merits in any case. A quilt, though, has its uses. Ahmad has been in enough New York winters to have grown accustomed, in her opinion, but then, hasn’t she been through enough New York summers fearing the power of the sun to melt her or dry her into dust? A quilt to wrap around his shoulders and throw over him as he sleeps and she sews will say everything a wedding dress does for the girls who bring them in to her. 

Chava lays the quilt out on her workbench and sets to work.

**Author's Note:**

> The summary quote is from the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 1917 version (aka a version Chava may have come to know). Beresheit 37:3. 
> 
> "K'tonet passim" is a transliteration of כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים, translated as "coat of many colors."


End file.
